Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
17 min listen
We had the first televised hustings for the leadership of the SNP last night, and it was a fiery affair to say the least. Will the lack of party unity end up costing the SNP? Lucy Dunn speaks to Katy Balls and Stephen Daisley.
Kate Forbes has made her case. She handily won last night’s STV debate between contenders for Nicola Sturgeon’s job. She spoke past the contest, which will be decided by SNP members, to the country at large, that latter constituency having been forgotten in the process to chose the next first minister. She brought the conversation back time and again to the need to listen to those who don’t support independence and to govern Scotland’s public services competently. If you want to ask people to put you in charge of an independent country, Forbes’s argument runs, you’ll have to show them you can run a devolved one first.
There’s a sudden vacancy in the constituency of Wakefield. The incumbent Labour MP hasn’t resigned or died. He just happens to be Simon Lightwood, a good example of nominative determinism. Lightwood’s weaselly intervention in Qurangate carries all the moral force of a sliver of driftwood carried along by the tide. In place of an MP, Wakefield has the faintest of shadows. Statement on the recent incident at Kettlethorpe High School: pic.twitter.com/k5a8eoslVA— Simon Lightwood MP (@simonlightwood) March 5, 2023 Note that he characterises teenage boys dropping and scuffing a book – a book which was the property of one of those boys – as ‘the incident’. Note that he condemns threats and ‘hate speech’, as he calls it, ‘from anyone’.
14 min listen
It's been an interesting week in the race for the leadership of the SNP. Kate Forbes's campaign has been plunged into fresh doubt by the news that her husband attended a private Tory hustings, whilst Douglas Ross has been forced to apologise after swearing during First Minister's Questions. We also had the first televised hustings, but who came out on top? Michael Simmons speaks to Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Stephen Daisley. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
‘I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it.’ I have read those words and read them again – and again. I have checked various news sources to be sure there was no error in translation or transcription. I have tried to parse the words to construe a meaning other than the one I know in my gut to be true. But it won’t work. The words mean what they say. They are a call for ethnic cleansing. The words were spoken by Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and leader of Tkuma, a religious nationalist party of the far right. Smotrich was interviewed yesterday morning at a conference hosted by Tel Aviv based financial newspaper, The Marker.
The first SNP leadership hustings was neatly summed up by the first question asked: ‘What will the candidates do to counter the misinformation, lies and antipathy aimed at our party on a daily basis by journalists based in Scotland?’ There was no mistaking that this was an SNP event. No political party likes the news media but Scottish nationalists are almost as much defined by their boundless, visceral hatred of journalists as they are by their ardour for independence. It wasn’t the only question to raise an eyebrow in Cumbernauld last night.
Alister Jack may be about to take another stand against reckless policy-making at Holyrood. According to reports, the Scottish Secretary may deny the Scottish government’s deposit return scheme (DRS) a trading exemption under the UK Internal Market Act (UKIMA). The DRS will see 20p added to every single-use packaged drink sold in Scotland, with consumers able to recoup the money by returning their used bottles and cans to retailers or reverse vending machines. Any drinks producer that hasn’t signed up to the scheme by midnight tonight risks being unable to sell their products in Scotland.
Huwara is a Palestinian town in the heart of the Shomron, the mountainous northern portion of the territory Israel refers to as Judea and Samaria and the world knows as the West Bank. Huwara is smouldering today after a night of rioting and fire-setting by Israeli residents. On Sunday, two Israelis, brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, 21 and 19 years old, from the nearby Israeli settlement of Har Bracha, were murdered by a Palestinian gunman. They were travelling through Huwara when they were gunned down at point-blank range while sitting in traffic. Their mother Esti said: ‘We have a huge hole in our hearts. Nothing will close that hole, not settlement construction, not a protest – nothing.’ Some settlers listened to other voices.
Luciana Berger’s return to the Labour party is not only a restoration but a supreme act of forgiveness. The former MP was hounded out of the party in 2019 because she was Jewish at a point where the whole rotten institution had become infested with antisemites. Berger fought to hold on to her party, not wishing to hand a victory to Jew-haters. This steeliness was not surprising, given her pedigree. Berger’s great-uncle was Manny Shinwell, Labour MP for Seaham and a straight-talking left-wing Jew. During a 1938 Commons debate, Shinwell was on his feet when the Conservative MP Robert Bower shouted: ‘Go back to Poland’. Shinwell paused his speech, walked across the gangway, socked Bower right in the jaw, then turn to the Speaker and said: ‘May I make a personal explanation?
Kate Forbes’ campaign to succeed Nicola Sturgeon has been largely written off by political rivals and the media. Her Christian faith is said to make her unsuitable to lead a progressive party like the SNP and to be the First Minister of a modern Scotland. Not least her admission that, while she doesn’t seek to roll back any existing rights, she wouldn’t have voted for same-sex marriage had she been an MSP when the legislation was before Holyrood. She also believes children should be born within wedlock and is sceptical of efforts to change the law on gender recognition. Game over, say people in the know. However, a new poll of SNP supporters finds the contest wide open.
Ash Regan is the latest MSP to launch a bid for the SNP leadership. The former Holyrood minister, who quit Nicola Sturgeon’s government over gender recognition reforms, addressed party members and journalists at the Hilton in North Queensferry this morning. Her pitch was red meat to the rank and file, abandoning referendums as the mechanism to achieve independence. Instead, she argued, 50 per cent plus one vote for the SNP and other nationalist parties in any Scottish or UK election would be grounds to enter negotiations with Westminster for Scotland’s secession. She noted that this was once a widely-held view inside the SNP and even among some of its Unionist opponents.
Kate Forbes’s religious views remain the only thing anyone wants to talk about in the contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon. I expected as much. Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, has come under fire for saying that she wouldn’t have voted for same-sex marriage and that she believes children should be born within wedlock. She has stressed that she wouldn’t roll back any existing rights. These are personal articles of faith rather than policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, her views are out of step with Sturgeon’s and those of almost the entire Scottish political firmament. Her political opponents – inside and outside the SNP – are aghast.
The SNP leadership contest should not be about Kate Forbes’ religious faith but that issue has quickly come to dominate. The 32-year-old is a member of the Free Church of Scotland, a small outfit that hews to Scripture on the sanctity of marriage and life. Now that she is running for SNP leader, she is being asked whether she would have voted to permit same-sex marriage had she been an MSP at that time. She says ‘no’, but that she would do nothing as First Minister to roll back rights already established. She has spoken about how her Christianity instructs her to love her neighbour and how that would drive her to serve all people to the best of her ability. That ought to be the end of the matter. It is not.
Humza Yousaf, the frontrunner to succeed Nicola Sturgeon, formally entered the race this morning. The venue was humble: Clydebank Town Hall. The town once took pride of place in the British shipbuilding industry, but was hit hard by the closure of the yards. Although it has benefited from regeneration in recent decades, deprivation remains a stubborn feature of life there. Clydebank was also home to the Singer sewing machine factory, where Yousaf’s grandfather worked when he brought his family to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s. The venue may have been humble but the staging was slick.
Whenever a governing party changes leader midway through a parliament, it’s interesting to note what the main opposition makes of the contest. Specifically, which candidate they would be more comfortable to see win — and which they dread the most. So, as the SNP begins choosing Nicola Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and first minister, I’ve been asking Scottish Tories what they think so far. Whomever the Scottish Nationalists pick will be staring down Douglas Ross every week at First Minister’s Questions, while the Scottish Tory leader will have to update his strategy and rhetoric for a post-Sturgeon era. So far there are two declared candidates.
The Daily Record has reported that Humza Yousaf, currently the Scottish health secretary, will stand for election to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. The 37-year-old Sturgeon ally is said to believe he can unite the party and a source tells the paper he has ‘a lot of support from MPs and MSPs’. If Yousaf did replace Sturgeon, it would be a landmark moment for Scotland Yousaf’s views on the constitution and gender identity are indistinguishable from Sturgeon’s and he can expect to be considered a continuity candidate. He is also a seasoned media performer, though no stranger to the occasional on-camera mishap. The Record says he will stress his ‘experience’ but that could go either way.
The contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon really shouldn’t be a contest at all. The obvious successor is Kate Forbes, the Scottish finance secretary. She is young at 32 but she was even younger three years ago when she stepped in to deliver the Scottish budget just 12 hours after finance minister Derek Mackay was forced by scandal to resign. Her plaudit-winning performance showed her to be a woman of ability and nerve. If you want to keep evangelical zeal out of politics, Kate Forbes is the least of your worries These are not her only qualities. Forbes is Cambridge-educated and a disciplined media performer. She is a true believer in the cause of independence but a moderate in tone and temperament.
The Granite City is an unlikely front in the cultural revolution, but Aberdeen University is about to change that. A document from the institution’s education committee has been passed to me. Titled ‘Decolonising the Curriculum – Timelines and Approval Processes’, it sets out plans to ‘embed a bold, progressive and sustained programme of antiracist curricular reform’. All courses will be given three years to ‘decolonise’. Academics are required to ‘review their reading lists’ and provide ‘additional perspectives on the course subject’. New courses must explain ‘how the curriculum will address the principle of decolonisation’. This will be ‘a constant process… not a linear project with a definite end’.
Nicola Sturgeon is resigning as First Minister of Scotland. We don’t yet know when — or why. After eight years in the role, unchallenged the whole time, she has hit troubles recently over gender law reform, the placement of Isla Bryson, a rapist, in a women’s prison and Sturgeon’s failure to deliver a promised second referendum on independence. If any of these is the reason for her departure, it would be odd as, although highly controversial, none has produced a rival for the crown. There is also a police investigation ongoing into a £667,000 independence fighting fund donated by supporters. (There is no suggestion Sturgeon has done anything illegal or improper.
Lee Anderson has changed my mind. I’ve always been an opponent of capital punishment but the Tory deputy chairman makes an irrefutable point: ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed.’ I could make a number of objections. I could say the death penalty violates the sanctity of human life. I could say it is vulnerable to wrongful conviction and execution. I could say handing power over life and death to a state that locked us in our homes for two years and forced old and sick people to die alone is remarkably trusting, to say nothing of forgiving. Instead of saying any of that, I’ll say this: fine, let’s bring back the death penalty.
